02 December 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
Torture Allegations Mount in Aftermath of Kherson Occupation
Sam Mednick, Associated Press
Mednick writes: "When a dozen Russian soldiers stormed into Dmytro Bilyi’s home in August, the 24-year-old police officer said they gave him a chilling choice: Hand in his pistol or his mother and brother would disappear."
When a dozen Russian soldiers stormed into Dmytro Bilyi’s home in August, the 24-year-old police officer said they gave him a chilling choice: Hand in his pistol or his mother and brother would disappear.
Bilyi turned his gun over to the soldiers, who carried machine guns and had their faces concealed. But it didn’t matter. They dragged him from his house in Ukraine’s southern village of Chornobaivka to a prison in the nearby regional capital of Kherson, where he said he was locked in a cell and tortured for days, his genitals and ears shocked with electricity.
“It was like hell all over my body,” Bilyi recalled. “It burns so bad it’s like the blood is boiling ... I just wanted it to stop,” he said.
More than two weeks after Russians retreated from the city, accounts such as his are helping to uncover sites where torture allegedly took place in Kherson, which Kremlin forces occupied for eight months. Five such rooms have been found in the city, along with at least four more in the wider Kherson region, where people allege that they were confined, beaten, shocked, interrogated and threatened with death, police said.
Human rights experts warn that the accusations made so far are likely only the beginning.
“For months we’ve received information about torture and other kind of persecution of civilians,” said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties, a local rights group. “I am afraid that horrible findings in Kherson still lie ahead.”
The Associated Press spoke with five people who allege that they were tortured or arbitrarily detained by Russians in Kherson or knew of others who disappeared and endured abuse. Sometimes, they said, the Russians rounded up whoever they saw — priests, soldiers, teachers or doctors — with no specific reason. In other cases, Russians were allegedly tipped off by sympathizers who provided names of people believed to be helping the Ukrainian military.
Once detained, the people said they were locked in crowded cells, fed meager portions of watery soup and bread and made to learn the Russian anthem while listening to screams from prisoners being tortured across the hall. Detainees were allegedly forced to give information about relatives or acquaintances with ties to the Ukrainian army, including names and locations disclosed in handwritten notes.
As a police officer with a father in the military, Bilyi remained under the radar for several months of Russia’s occupation, until he said someone likely tipped them off. He spent four days in a cell with others, being pulled out for questioning and electric shocks.
Investigators accused him of having a Kalashnikov rifle — not just a pistol — and pressured him to share his father’s whereabouts. Then they shocked him for half an hour a day for two days before releasing him, he said.
Ukrainian national police allege that more than 460 war crimes have been committed by Russian soldiers in recently occupied areas of Kherson. The torture in the city occurred in two police stations, one police-run detention center, a prison and a private medical facility, where rubber batons, baseball bats and a machine used for applying electrical shocks were found, said Andrii Kovanyi a press officer for the police in Kherson.
When Igor was detained in September from the call center where he worked, he was brought into a room, ordered to remove his shirt and to place his palms on the metal door to increase the flow of electricity and the pain of being shocked with a stun gun, he said.
The Russian soldier said, “Are you ready? Now you’re going to scream like a bitch ... You will not get out of here, and we will kill you,” said Igor, who spoke on the condition that only his first name be used to protect his identity.
The 22-year-old, accused of providing Ukrainians with Russian military positions, said he was shocked by the gun along his back for 2 1/2 hours and then forced to stay awake in a chair all night.
Pictures on his phone, seen by the AP, show clusters of red circular marks lining the length of his back. He was freed after two days but not before writing a letter providing details about a relative of his uncle’s who the Russians wanted information on.
Documenting the crimes in Kherson will be challenging because no other city this large has been occupied by Russia for so long, said Brian Castner senior crisis adviser at Amnesty International.
“Evidence must be collected and preserved to maintain that chain of custody, so that when there is international justice, the evidence is lock-tight and perpetrators can be held to account,” he said.
Police in Kherson are investigating and collecting testimony. But more and more people are arriving daily, and the justice system is overwhelmed, local rights experts said.
In March, Dmytro Plotnikov’s friend was seized by Russians when he went to Kherson’s central square to run errands shortly after the occupation began. Plotnikov knows of three other people who were captured and released by Russians, one of whom still had visible bruises on his body more than a month after being freed, he said.
But since the Russians left Kherson, what concerns him most are the Ukrainians who collaborated with them and remained.
In May, Plotnikov’s neighbor posted a photo of his sister and her address on a Russian chat group, he said. His sister is outspokenly pro-Ukrainian, and the neighbor accused her of spreading hate about Russian people, he said. Had the Russians seen it, they might have come to her house and arrested the family, he said.
Ukrainian police have spoken to the woman, but she remains in the community, he said.
“They should be punished,” Plotnikov said. “I am ashamed that such people are around ... why in the 21st century (can) you can be tortured for your pro-Ukrainian position, for your love of the Ukrainian language and culture? I do not understand it.”
READ MORE
President Biden hosted President Emmanuel Macron of France for his first state dinner as president. (photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times)
Biden, Speaking With Macron, Says He’s Open to Meeting With Putin
Zolan Kanno-Youngs, The New York Times
Kanno-Youngs writes: "Showing a united front during a state visit, President Biden and President Emmanuel Macron of France expressed support for Ukraine. Mr. Biden said he would meet with the Russian president if he showed a willingness to end the war."
President Biden said he would talk with President Vladimir Putin if the Russian leader expresses a desire to end his invasion of Ukraine, but Mr. Biden said he would only do so in consultation with NATO allies.
“I’m prepared if he’s willing to talk to find out what he’s willing to do,” Mr. Biden said during a news conference at the White House following a three-hour meeting with President Emmanuel Macron of France. “But I’ll only do it in consultation with my NATO allies. I’m not going to do it on my own.”
Mr. Biden made the statement after condemning Mr. Putin for the invasion of Ukraine, calling the Russian president’s actions “sick.”
After their private meeting, Mr. Biden and Mr. Macron lavished praise on each other despite tensions about the handling of the nine-month war in Europe and French anger over what they see as unfair economic policies by the Biden administration.
Mr. Biden said he makes “no apologies” for the Inflation Reduction Act, which directs billions of dollars in government funding to green energy companies. But he appeared eager to ease the French concerns, saying that the bill had “glitches” that could be solved. “There’s a lot we can work out,” he said.
Mr. Macron also moderated his previous criticisms, saying that he told Mr. Biden of the need to “re-synchronize” their economic partnership to “succeed together.”
Mr. Biden on Thursday is hosting the leader of America’s oldest ally for a day of elaborate pomp that began with an arrival ceremony featuring a 21-gun salute and will end with a state dinner of butter-poached lobster and caviar.
In the news conference, Mr. Biden acknowledged that France and the United States occasionally have “some slight differences, but never in a fundamental way.” And he stressed the unity being shown by the two countries opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Today, we reaffirm that, as I said, we’re going to stand together against this brutality,” Mr. Biden said. “And we’ll continue strong support for the Ukrainian people as they defend their homes and their families and their nurseries, their hospitals, their sovereignty, their integrity, and against Russian aggression.”
Here’s what else you need to know:
Mr. Biden bristled at a question about why he didn’t help negotiate paid leave for rail workers, saying that he had “negotiated a contract no one else can negotiate.” He said that he would continue to fight for paid leave for all Americans, but acknowledged that the rail contract under consideration in Congress would not include that benefit.
The French president played down disagreements with Mr. Biden about Ukraine, echoing the United States’ view that there should be no pressure on Ukrainians to accept a compromise that they do not agree with. “We have to respect Ukrainians to design the moments and the conditions in which they will negotiate about their territory and their future,” Mr. Macron said.
In addition to lobster, the Macrons will also be treated to an American cheese course at the dinner, including Oregon-based Rogue River Blue, the winner of the 2019-20 World Cheese awards. The feast is the first official state dinner of the Biden administration — coming later than usual because of the coronavirus pandemic.
READ MORE
Former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. (photo: AP)
Trump Mar-a-Lago Special Master Struck Down by Appeals Court
Perry Stein and Devlin Barrett, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "The three-judge panel said Judge Aileen Cannon erred in appointing a special master to review documents seized by the FBI."
The three-judge panel said Judge Aileen Cannon erred in appointing a special master to review documents seized by the FBI
Afederal appeals court panel on Thursday halted an outside review of thousands of documents seized from former president Donald Trump’s Florida residence, ruling that a lower court judge was wrong to appoint an expert to decide whether any of the material should be shielded from criminal investigators.
Trump sought the outside arbiter, known as a special master, after the FBI executed a court-approved search of Mar-a-Lago, his home and private club, on Aug. 8, retrieving more than 13,000 documents related to Trump’s time in the White House. About 100 of the documents were classified, and some contained extremely sensitive government secrets, according to court records.
The appeals court decision was an emphatic win for the Justice Department, and the latest legal loss for Trump, who has gone to court multiple times to try to stop the government from getting access to records or personal information. Just last week, the Supreme Court denied the former president’s request to block a congressional committee from receiving copies of six years of his tax returns, clearing the way for them to be handed over to lawmakers.
Thursday’s unanimous ruling, which Trump may appeal to the Supreme Court, means criminal investigators can again access the unclassified documents that were recovered in the search. The Justice Department has said those materials may be important in their probe of the possible mishandling of classified documents, obstruction and destruction of government property at Mar-a-Lago.
An earlier appeals court ruling exempted the documents with classified markings from the special master review.
In addition to potentially slowing down the investigation, the special-master review provided Trump’s lawyers with a public platform to make their arguments about why they believed the Mar-a-Lago search was unfair. While those arguments did not hold much sway with judges, they may have nonetheless buoyed Trump’s political base.
“The panel’s decision today is purely procedural and based only on jurisdiction,” a Trump spokesman said in a statement. “The decision does not address the merits that clearly demonstrate the impropriety of the unprecedented, illegal, and unwarranted raid on Mar-a-Lago.”
U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon of Florida agreed months ago to appoint Judge Raymond J. Dearie of Brooklyn as special master to review the Mar-a-Lago documents, rejecting the Justice Department’s argument that former presidents cannot claim executive privilege after leaving office. Cannon also noted that the FBI took some of Trump’s personal materials that were mixed with the government documents.
But special master appointments are rare, and judges at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit expressed concern at oral arguments that Cannon’s decision set a troubling precedent: allowing the target of a search warrant to go into court and request a special master that could interfere with an executive branch investigation before an indictment is ever issued.
The three judges — two of whom were nominated by Trump — did not back down from that stance in their written opinion Thursday. They said they could not issue an order that “allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant.”
“Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so,” the Thursday opinion read. “Either approach would be a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”
During oral arguments, government attorney Sopan Joshi called the decision to name a special master an “intrusion” on the executive branch.
But James Trusty, an attorney for Trump, said the special master appointment didn’t significantly hamper the government’s criminal probe. Trusty said the search of Mar-a-Lago was conducted in a “carte blanche” manner, with agents taking personal items including golf shirts and a photo of singer Celine Dion.
In their opinion, the judges rebuked a central part of the argument by Trump’s legal team: that the Presidential Records Act allowed Trump to categorize presidential documents as personal ones, creating the need for a special master to determine whether personal documents should be shielded from investigators.
The judges conceded that the search of a former president’s property is “indeed extraordinary … but not in a way that affects our legal analysis or otherwise gives the judiciary license to interfere in an ongoing investigation.”
Ultimately, the judges said that the status of the documents as personal or presidential should not determine whether a special master is needed. The warrant to search Mar-a-Lago, the opinion said, was properly approved by a judge; whether Trump was lawfully in possession of the seized documents could be assessed in future legal proceedings.
“The magistrate judge decided that issue when approving the warrant. To the extent that the categorization of these documents has legal relevance in future proceedings, the issue can be raised at that time,” the opinion reads. “All these arguments are a sideshow.”
Dearie’s review was expected to conclude this month. He has not made any recommendations to Cannon about whether any documents should be shielded from criminal investigators. But during public hearings, he has expressed deep skepticism that Trump could claim privileges over large swaths of the documents.
“My view is you can’t have your cake and eat it,” he said at a September hearing, after Trump’s attorneys suggested that Trump may have declassified some of the sensitive seized materials but stopped short of saying that he actually did.
The Mar-a-Lago probe is one of three criminal investigations involving Trump that have built momentum over the past year. The Justice Department is also investigating the role of Trump and his allies in efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, including any potential involvement in the bloody riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence were formally tallying President Biden’s electoral victory.
Attorney General Merrick Garland recently appointed a special counsel to oversee both those investigations, saying it was important to avoid any potential conflict of interest for the Justice Department as Trump launches a new bid for the White House and Biden says he plans to run as well.
In addition, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) is investigating the role of Trump and his allies in trying to overturn Biden’s election victory in Georgia in 2020.
The appeals panel that issued Thursday’s opinion included Judge William H. Pryor, the former attorney general of Alabama, who was nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush and who Trump considered for a Supreme Court appointment while he was in the White House.
The other two judges on the panel, Andrew L. Brasher and Britt C. Grant, are Trump nominees. They also were on the three-judge panel that ruled against Trump earlier this fall on limited aspects of the special master appointment, restoring access for criminal investigators to the 103 documents with classified markings.
In considering the arguments by Trump’s lawyers, the judges wrote, “we are faced with a choice: apply our usual test; drastically expand the availability of equitable jurisdiction for every subject of a search warrant; or carve out an unprecedented exception in our law for former presidents. We choose the first option. So the case must be dismissed.”
The judges said the seizure of personal items in a court-approved search did not necessitate the appointment of a special master.
“While Plaintiff may have an interest in these items and others like them, we do not see the need for their immediate return after seizure under a presumptively lawful search warrant,” the Thursday opinion reads.
READ MORE
Railroad workers were fighting for the basic ability to call in sick or see a doctor without being penalized, something that many of us – including members of Congress and railroad company executives – take for granted. (photo: Bing Guan/Reuters)
Hamilton Nolan | Biden Just Knifed Labor Unions in the Back. They Shouldn’t Forget It
Hamilton Nolan, Guardian UK
Nolan writes: "It’s sad, really. The beleaguered labor unions of America thought that they had finally found a true friend."
US railway workers threatened to strike until they got paid sick leave. The president’s administration chose political cowardice
It’s sad, really. The beleaguered labor unions of America thought that they had finally found a true friend. In Joe Biden, they had a man who was the most pro-union president in my lifetime – a low bar to clear, but something. Yet this week we found out that when the fight got hard, Biden had the same thing to say to working people that his Democratic predecessors have for decades: “You’ll never get anything you want if I don’t win; but once I win, I can’t do the things you need, because then I wouldn’t be able to win again.”
At the same time that thousands of union members are fanned out across the state of Georgia knocking on doors to get Raphael Warnock elected and solidify Democratic control of the Senate – to save the working class, of course! – Biden decided to sell out workers in the single biggest labor battle of his administration. Rather than allowing the nation’s railroad workers to exercise their right to strike, he used his power to intervene and force them to accept a deal that a majority of those workers found to be unacceptable.
His ability to do this rests on the vagaries of the Railway Labor Act, but all you really need to understand is this: nobody forced him to side with the railroad companies over the workers. That was a choice. The White House just weighed the political damage it anticipated from Republicans screaming about a Christmas-season rail strike against the fact that railroad workers have inhuman working conditions and would need to go on strike to change that, and chose the easier political route. This was a “Which side are you on?” moment, and Biden made his position clear.
What were these railroad workers fighting for? Paid sick leave. The basic ability to call in sick or go see a doctor without being penalized, something that many of us – including members of Congress and railroad company executives – take for granted. It is also, by the way, a right that Joe Biden believes should be codified into federal law. But he must not believe in it all that much, since he just cut the legs out from under unions who were trying to secure it for their members.
And why is it so difficult for railroad workers to win this basic right? Their industry, after all, is fantastically profitable. It has cut its workforce to the bone purely to enrich investors, and doesn’t want to spend the money it would take to staff properly so that its remaining workers could take sick days. Greed, and nothing more. The combined power of the railway unions could overcome this obstacle, but only if they have the ability to go on strike. Railroad companies are not stupid. They knew the White House would intervene to prevent a strike, so they felt no urgency to give in to their workers’ demands. Joe Biden, Mr I-Love-Unions, unilaterally disarmed the unions before their fight could begin. Without a credible strike threat, they never had a chance.
People will point out that strikes are disruptive. Yes. That’s the point. A rail strike would be so disruptive that the rail companies probably would have given up the sick days to prevent it – and if they didn’t, the White House could have weighed in on the side of the workers to make them. Instead, it did the opposite, and rescuing hope for those workers fell to Bernie Sanders and to progressives in the House, who forced congressional leaders to move a separate bill to guarantee the sick leave they were asking for. As usual, it was the left that went to the trouble of fighting for labor after the party’s mainstream sold it out for the sake of convenience.
Organized labor is in an abusive relationship with the Democratic party. For decades, Democratic administrations have failed to prioritize labor issues and stabbed unions in the back, and the union establishment has always showed up with a big check for them in the next election. I guarantee you that this will happen again after this betrayal by Joe Biden. (You may have already noticed that few union leaders have been brave enough to criticize the White House directly on this issue.)
Breaking free from this dynamic does not mean getting friendly with the Republicans, who would happily bring back indentured servants and child labor if they could. It means going left, to the only part of the political spectrum that genuinely gives a damn about the interests of working people. Rather than pouring its considerable resources into the mainstream Democrats, the labor movement should be bankrolling the expansion of the progressive wing of the party, to permanently shift the internal balance of power. This is not some rarefied ideological prescription from a textbook; it is common sense. If you are a railroad worker – or anyone who understands the basic need for solidarity among all workers in the face of corporate power – where are your friends? They are all sitting on the left. If we keep running back to support those who just kicked sand in our faces, nothing will ever change.
And instead of kissing and making up with Biden after this outrageous insult, labor should be putting the fear of God in him with the possibility that they will back a primary presidential challenge from the left in 2024. Biden is very old and not very popular. He has been a friend to unions, yes, but if he goes against them on the biggest fight of all, how much of a friend is he, really?
Nothing has as much latent power as organized working people. We need to stop begging politicians for their support, and make them come beg for ours. Just because a strike is illegal, after all, doesn’t mean that it can’t happen.
READ MORE
A man wears a Herschel Walker hat during an election night watch party, in Smyrna, Ga., on Nov. 8, 2022. (photo: Brynn Anderson/AP)
Fossil Fuel-Funded Super PAC Eyes $11.5 Million Spending Operation for Herschel Walker in Final Days
Nick Surgey and Lee Fang, The Intercept
Excerpt: "Leaked documents show the Empowerment Alliance, a dark-money group tied to energy industry, is planning to inject $1.5 million into the Georgia run-off to turn voters out."
In a last-minute bid to shape the composition of the U.S. Senate, fossil fuel energy industry interests are planning to infuse $1.5 million into Georgia in support of Herschel Walker, the Republican facing off with Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., in the runoff on December 6.
The infusions of cash, designed largely for get-out-the-vote efforts, are detailed in documents tied to Run Herschel Run, a super PAC, and the Empowerment Alliance, a nonprofit that says it is devoted to policies to “secure America’s energy independence and, with it, Americans’ prosperity, freedom, and security.”
The effort reflects the consensus view that voter drop-off in the last Georgia runoff after the 2020 election led to Republican defeat, an outcome the outside groups hope to change for the election next week.
“Republicans lost both US Senate runoffs in 2021 because the Republican coalition that voted in November did not turnout in January,” notes a slide deck prepared by the Run Herschel Run political action committee. “Tens of millions of dollars were spent on television ads, but comparatively little on the vital ‘ground game’. This effort fills that gap in 2022 while others still focus on TV.”
The Empowerment Alliance is registered in Kentucky and does not disclose its donors. But the group, launched in 2019, hardly hides its affiliation with the oil, gas, and energy utility industries. The Empowerment Alliance promised when it launched to push a national campaign to promote natural gas while battling renewable energy-focused policies such as the Green New Deal.
Matthew Hammond, the executive director of the group, was previously the president of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association and a registered lobbyist for fracking interests. The Energy and Policy Institute, a watchdog group, published documents that show close financial ties, through surrogate groups, between the utility giants Duke Energy, American Electric Power, and Entergy to the Empowerment Alliance.
The alliance did not respond to a request for comment.
The Empowerment Alliance plans to contribute $1.5 million out of a planned $11 million budget for the Run Herschel Run super PAC, a group that is spearheading an independent effort to elect Walker, according to the leaked documents.
Spending records show the PAC has retained Majority Strategies to engage in direct marketing in opposition to Warnock.
The groups plan to target the nearly half million voters who voted for Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and declined to support Walker in the general election last month. The internal budget for the group lists $1 million for direct contact with voters door-to-door, $500,000 for telemarketing, $4 million for digital advertisements, and $5 million for traditional mail advertisements.
The Empowerment Alliance President Brooke Bodney notes in one of the documents that her organization has identified 136,000 mid- to low-propensity voters who lean Republican, voted in the last runoff and general election, and care about energy issues.
The PAC’s pre-runoff disclosure filing shows a $50,000 donation from Javaid Anwar, the owner of Texas oil company Midland Energy. The bulk of the funding for Run Herschel Run may not be known until after Georgia has selected a senator. As OpenSecrets has noted, so-called pop-up super PACs involved in the runoff only have to file disclosures for donors through November 16, and many will not have to disclose donors until after the election is already over.
Earlier this year, the Affordable Energy PAC, a group that ran in “parallel” to the Empowerment Alliance, raised over $1 million for election-related purposes, largely to boost the campaign of J.D. Vance, who triumphed in his Senate race in Ohio. The Affordable Energy Fund maintains close ties to the Empowerment Alliance. The fund retained a consulting firm run by James Nathanson, a Republican consultant who served as the alliance’s first executive director.
“Vote Affordable Energy. Vote JD Vance,” read one of the mailers that went to Ohio voters. The group features similar messaging against Warnock on its website.
The Empowerment Alliance’s blunt talk disparaging renewable energy may face headwinds in Georgia. The dark-money group has sharply mocked the growing adoption of electric vehicles, and has sneered at the “ongoing electric vehicle push from the Biden Administration” as “just another slogan masquerading as policy.”
But electric vehicles have proven popular election-season issues for voters in Georgia.
Both Kemp and Warnock have regularly touted the success in bringing electric vehicle projects, including a $5.5 billion Hyundai factory to build electric cars and a $5 billion Rivian electric truck plant, manufacturing facilities that are set to bring thousands of jobs to the state.
READ MORE
A St. Louis ordinance lets courts banish people from huge swaths of the city as a punishment for petty crimes. (photo: AP)
St. Louis Can Banish People From Entire Neighborhoods. Police Can Arrest Them if They Come Back.
Jeremy Kohler, ProPublica
Kohler writes: "A St. Louis ordinance lets courts banish people from huge swaths of the city as a punishment for petty crimes. These neighborhood orders of protection often prevent people from accessing the services they need and raise constitutional questions."
A St. Louis ordinance lets courts banish people from huge swaths of the city as a punishment for petty crimes. These neighborhood orders of protection often prevent people from accessing the services they need and raise constitutional questions.
Inside the Enterprise Center, the St. Louis Blues hockey team was losing a home game to the Edmonton Oilers. Outside, a man named Alvin Cooper was lying on a venting grate on a 38-degree night.
A St. Louis police sergeant asked him to move, according to an officer’s December 2018 report. Cooper refused. The sergeant and the officer pointed to signs that said “No Trespassing” and “No Panhandling.” Cooper said, “I ain’t going nowhere.” The officers tried to handcuff Cooper, one of them using “nerve pressure points on his jaw and behind his ear,” the other delivering “several knee thrusts” to Cooper’s right leg.
The officers arrested Cooper and booked him on charges of trespassing and resisting arrest. Two weeks later, a city prosecutor dropped the resisting arrest charge, while Cooper pleaded guilty to trespassing and signed an agreement offered to him by the prosecutor saying that as a condition of his probation, he would stay out of downtown St. Louis for a year.
The neighborhood order of protection, as the agreement is called, meant that Cooper could be arrested if he so much as set foot inside a 1.2-square-mile area — more than 100 city blocks — that is home to many of the organizations that provide shelter, meals and care to St. Louis’ homeless people.
Other American cities order people to stay away from specific individuals or places, and some have set up defined areas that are off-limits to people convicted of drug or prostitution charges. But few have taken the practice to St. Louis’ extreme, particularly as a response to petty incidents, according to experts in law enforcement.
Seattle and some of its suburbs, including Everett, have blocked off certain areas of their cities as “exclusion zones” where people who have been convicted of drug or prostitution offenses can be arrested. The practice has long been criticized by civil rights advocates, but city leaders say it has helped reduce crime.
Cincinnati once barred people convicted of drug offenses from its own “exclusion zones.” But a court struck down the practice as a violation of the constitutional freedoms of association and movement, and the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 let that ruling stand. The Chicago suburb of Elgin adopted rules in 2016 that ban people who have repeatedly caused nuisances from some sections of the city, but it has been enforced sparingly.
In St. Louis, neighborhood orders of protection affect large swaths of the city and are typically in effect for a year or two, although some orders have had expiration dates in 2099, according to records obtained by ProPublica. A person who violates an order may face a fine of up to $500 or be sentenced to as long as 90 days in jail.
Victor St. John, an assistant professor of criminology at Saint Louis University, said even limited bans may have a dire impact “in terms of individuals not being able to engage with family members or friends.”
“It’s a restriction on resources that are publicly available to everyone else,” he said, adding, “I haven’t heard of entire neighborhoods.”
Yet just how rare the practice is across the country is difficult to assess, in large part because it has not been closely tracked. University of Washington professors Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert, who have studied Seattle’s efforts, said in their 2009 book, “Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America,” that banishment is “rarely debated publicly” and that cities’ tactics are “largely deployed without much fanfare.”
“I think part of the problem is that these legal tools are very much under the radar,” Beckett said.
When neighborhood orders of protection are employed in St. Louis, critics say that they are too often used against people with mental health issues or who may be homeless, and that banishing an individual from a large section of the city may violate their civil rights. They say the orders fail to address the underlying problems contributing to their behavior.
Instead, they simply move problems from one part of the city to another.
The ACLU of Missouri said that it had explored a lawsuit to challenge the practice a decade ago but eventually did not because the organization did not have enough information and did not have consistent contact with a potential plaintiff.
“City courts violate the constitutional rights of Missourians when they issue broad, arbitrary banishment orders untied to any legitimate governmental purpose,” the group said in a statement. “The fact that such orders are used against people who have committed harmless, petty crimes only makes plain that the orders are about inconveniencing the vulnerable, and not about public safety.”
Some people have been barred from multiple neighborhoods. Some have been arrested for violating their bans multiple times within a few days.
“It reeks of redlining,” said Mary Fox, the longtime lead public defender in St. Louis who now heads the state’s public defender system. “It reeks of everything that happened before the Civil Rights Act went through — just allowing them to keep certain people out of their neighborhoods.”
Neighborhood orders of protection are another way policing in St. Louis is employed on behalf of the wealthy and against those most vulnerable. A ProPublica investigation showed how residents of affluent city neighborhoods hire private policing companies to patrol public spaces and protect their homes and busineses, creating dramatic disparities in how local law enforcement is provided.
Private policing and neighborhood orders of protection often go hand in hand, with private police officers doing much of the work to enforce the orders, according to emails obtained by ProPublica.
The city’s Municipal Court paused issuing neighborhood orders of protection at the start of the pandemic — not because of any policy change but because the process requires the defendant to appear in court and city courts are closed to in-person proceedings.
But police have issued citations for violations of the orders as recently as July 2021, records show. Some defendants also face active court cases for alleged violations. Moreover, a city ordinance authorizing the orders remains in effect, and St. Louis police are under orders to collect evidence that can help prosecutors pursue orders of protection.
St. Louis Municipal Administrative Judge Newton McCoy said in an email that defendants may be subject to neighborhood orders of protection “on a case by case basis” as a condition of probation “if they repeatedly commit offenses in certain neighborhoods.” He said court officials are “working to determine next steps for when all in-person municipal court hearings will resume.”
The banishments require the consent of the defendant, but some lawyers question whether defendants really have any choice but to sign. In one instance, a man was arrested for trespassing while gathering on a city sidewalk with friends across the street from a downtown homeless shelter. He agreed to stay out of downtown but was subsequently arrested for a violation and served three months in jail, a case highlighted by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“I don’t think the actual terms of the neighborhood order of protection were clear to my client,” said Maureen Hanlon, an attorney for the public-interest law group ArchCity Defenders. “It states that he consented to it, but he was unrepresented at the time.” She entered the case after his incarceration for violating the order, “which, on paper, he agreed to, but in reality, I really question whether or not someone can agree to an order like that without counsel.”
ProPublica was not able to determine how many neighborhood orders of protection have been issued over the past two decades. Court cases are typically sealed after the successful completion of probation. It was also unclear if any remained in effect.
Megan Green, who on Nov. 8 was elected president of the city’s Board of Aldermen and is the city’s second-highest ranking official, said she has long heard from advocates for the homeless who say the orders make it difficult for the city’s most vulnerable people to receive meals or other services.
Green said she wants to study the use of neighborhood orders of protection to “understand the implications. And if we need to take a look at a revision, I think, potentially do that.”
“If you are banning somebody from downtown from the area where services are, that makes it that much harder to address the needs,” Green added. She said she also found it problematic that “if you’re just banning somebody from a certain area, and never addressing the behavior, chances are that behavior just moves to another block or another neighborhood.
“So I’m not sure how effective something like this is at achieving what folks are going for, either.”
Neighborhood leaders and police officials have defended neighborhood orders of protection as a tool for residents and businesses to make their streets safer by sending a message to criminals that they are not welcome.
St. Louis police Sgt. Charles Wall said the department merely enforces the orders once they’re issued.
Jim Whyte, who manages a private policing initiative in the city’s upscale Central West End, said neighborhood orders of protection are “used all over the city to kind of address these very problematic people.”
Whyte said that the orders were sometimes difficult to enforce. “If the person was involved in panhandling or a crime incident, I’d call the prosecutor and say, ‘Hey, this guy was down here Thursday violating the order.’” Whyte said that the prosecutor would ask if there was an arrest and he would say “like, ‘No, there weren’t any police around.’”
In those cases, Whyte said, prosecutors would not support charging the person with a violation.
Cooper could not be reached for comment. His mother, Karen Johnson, said her son, now 39, has suffered from schizophrenia since graduating from high school. His use of prescription medication, she said, led to reliance on street drugs and a life that spiraled into homelessness. During his ban from downtown, he moved out of the city and stayed with a family member in suburban Cool Valley. The court’s action to ban her son from downtown was “wrong,” his mother said. “That’s where he was getting a lot of help — the downtown area.”
This fall, she said, he was shot and wounded in an assault while he was living in a hotel.
The impetus for neighborhood orders of protection is murky. The St. Louis Board of Aldermen in 2003 unanimously passed the ordinance laying out penalties for violating orders, but it’s not clear if they existed before. Three of the bill’s four living sponsors — Jay Ozier, Dionne Flowers and James Shrewsbury — said they do not remember what prompted the measure. The fourth, Craig Schmid, could not be reached. None remain on the board.
“Particularly if you’re talking about it in terms of panhandling or something like that, I don’t see how I could have been in favor of it,” said Ozier, who served from 2002 to 2003.
The language in the ordinance suggests it was aimed at drug offenders. “Whereas, the illegal distribution, possession, sale and manufacture of controlled substances continues to plague our neighborhoods,” it reads. But in practice, the police in St. Louis have used the orders of protection more broadly.
To obtain an order, a representative for a neighborhood must document that a person who has been arrested has repeatedly caused trouble there. A prosecutor can use this statement as part of the neighborhood’s request for the order of protection. The prosecutor can then offer the agreement to the defendant, typically in exchange for dropping one or more charges against them.
The text of the order — with specific boundaries of the banishment area — is then added to a St. Louis-area criminal justice database, which can be accessed only by police and court officials. When police officers run the name of a person who has been issued an order of protection, the database will alert the officers.
For several years, neighborhood leaders viewed the orders as a tool for taking back their streets — sending criminals a message that they are not welcome. In 2014, for instance, about 50 residents of the city’s Tower Grove South neighborhood successfully petitioned a Circuit Court judge to order a carjacking suspect to stay away as a condition of release. “The show of solidarity from the residents of Tower Grove South played an important part in the positive outcome of today's hearing,” the neighborhood’s website boasted. “Congratulations TGS!”
As late as 2015, the website for the city’s top prosecutor, Jennifer Joyce, featured a page where residents could view the names and photos of people who had been banished under neighborhood orders of protection.
The circuit courts, which handle misdemeanors and felonies, have not issued a neighborhood order of protection at least since progressive prosecutor Kimberly M. Gardner succeeded Joyce in 2017. But the practice has persisted in Municipal Court, where defendants face infractions, typically do not have lawyers and cases receive little public scrutiny.
Some cases can linger for years, as police repeatedly seek and enforce neighborhood orders of protection against the same people with little evidence that the orders are effective. In a report in 2017, a St. Louis police officer wrote that he was working for the department’s downtown bike unit and trying to combat a “rise in quality of life violations” downtown. He said a motorist complained about homeless people outside the city’s Dome, where the NFL’s Rams used to play.
One of the men the motorist pointed to was Gary Accardi, who the officer said was a “well-known panhandler,” according to his report. Accardi was holding a cardboard sign that said: “Homeless, Please help. God Bless.”
Four years earlier, in 2013, police had cited Accardi five times for violating a neighborhood order of protection, and he had spent 10 days in jail. As the officer approached, he wrote in his report, Accardi ran away yelling, “I don’t want to go to jail!” The officer wrote that he caught up with Accardi and put him on the ground to get him under control.
Accardi was charged with panhandling, resisting arrest and impeding traffic. Weeks later, Accardi agreed in municipal court to stay out of downtown St. Louis for one year.
Over the next few years, the order against Accardi was repeatedly extended and he was cited for violating it 17 times from July 27 to Oct. 17, 2018; on two occasions during that stretch he was cited twice in the same day.
In April 2019, while St. Louis Cardinals fans packed Busch Stadium downtown for opening day, police officers spotted Accardi outside the stadium and issued him a summons for violating the order.
The next day, Accardi was rifling through a trash can outside the stadium and another officer cited him yet again for the violation.
Stephanie Lummus, a lawyer who has represented Accardi in some of his cases, said a judge in 2020 declared him incapacitated and placed him under a guardianship. The guardian, she said, ordered her not to speak on his behalf.
Lummus said she frequently appears in municipal court on behalf of clients with cases on the court’s mental health docket — a special court day designed to match vulnerable people with services that can help them.
“I would sit there and wait for my client,” she said. “And I’d watch these people on the mental health docket sign these neighborhood orders of protection unrepresented, not knowing what the hell was going on. And I was just like, This is not the place for that, you know. These people are on the mental health docket for a reason. Why are you doing this?”
In some St. Louis neighborhoods, private police companies have enforced neighborhood orders of protection. Minutes from a 2018 meeting of a downtown community improvement district indicate that a private policing contractor had pursued neighborhood orders of protection for 25 “persistent offenders.”
Officers working off-duty for The City’s Finest, St. Louis’ biggest private policing company, have enforced neighborhood orders of protection in the Central West End, emails show.
“Neighborhood orders of protection are legal and issued by the courts,” the firm’s owner, Charles “Rob” Betts, said in an email. “If you have an issue with it you should probably discuss such with the court system that issues them. Or better yet, talk to the residents and businesses that are severely affected by aggressive panhandling.”
Whyte’s office, which serves as a substation for The City’s Finest in the Central West End, had a bulletin board where the names of people with neighborhood orders of protection are posted. That way the private officers know whom to look for, emails obtained by ProPublica through a public record request show.
Whyte recalled the case of a woman with chronic drug problems who he said was a persistent panhandler in the Central West End and who had been accused of petty theft. Neighborhood leaders sought to banish her after she created repeated problems.
“We were seeking an order of protection against her because she didn’t live in the neighborhood, didn’t work in the neighborhood,” he said. “She had tallied up a number of incidents and police contacts.”
He said the neighborhood never sought the orders “as an immediate action, it was always used as kind of, ‘Well, we have no other choice.’”
In the fall of 2018, the clock had run out on neighborhood orders of protection against some people who had been banished from the Central West End. Whyte wrote to Richard Sykora, a lawyer for the city who was in charge of pursuing the orders in municipal court.
“Many of our NOP’s have expired and unfortunately many of our problem people have returned to the CWE area,” Whyte wrote, adding, “We would appreciate you looking into obtaining NOP’s on the following subjects.”
Whyte described one person as having “been observed buying narcotics” and another as having stolen a tip jar from a coffee shop. One was “mentally unstable” and “very disruptive at local businesses.” Another had repeatedly violated a previous neighborhood order of protection and, Whyte wrote, “continues to be a persistent panhandler.”
Yet another, Whyte wrote, had been working with an organization that offers behavioral health services but he “has resumed aggressively panhandling.”
Sykora wrote to Whyte a few days later saying he would seek new neighborhood orders of protection against most of the people Whyte had listed. In one case, Sykora told Whyte, the judge had made only half the neighborhood off-limits so the person could get to his job without breaking the law. Whyte told Sykora that he had checked with the employer and the defendant didn’t really work there. “Could we get the order modified?” he asked.
Sykora did not respond to a request for comment.
Whyte’s requests led to some of those people being banished again. They could be arrested on sight for setting foot in the 1.9-square-mile neighborhood. And some of them were.
Whyte said the neighborhood has sought orders for people that were “running amok in the Central West End neighborhood. They wouldn’t heed any other warnings by the police, they wouldn’t conform, their behavior was antisocial.”
“The reality is they don’t go to other neighborhoods” after being ordered to stay out of the Central West End, he said. “They don’t care about the order of protection.”
Whyte said that since in-person court hearings have stopped, the neighborhood had hired a homeless outreach coordinator to try to address vagrancy in the neighborhood.
One person the neighborhood has banished was Lorse Weatherspoon, a homeless man with a history of petty crimes. He was arrested in the Central West End in 2018 on suspicion of trespassing and burglary after a private policing company posted a $250 reward for his arrest. It isn’t clear what happened with those charges, but the city charged him with five violations of his ban from entering the neighborhood.
“Lorse Weatherspoon was responsible for a crime a night,” said Jim Dwyer, chairman of one of the Central West End business districts that hires private police.
Whyte said residents would send him surveillance video of prowlers, “And I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s Lorse Weatherspoon trying to see if he can get a bike out of your garage or steal your lawn mower.’”
Neil Barron, Weatherspoon’s lawyer, said the order was a “blatantly unconstitutional violation of a person’s right to freely travel.”
“Think about all the money used on this,” he added. “Does it solve the problem? Does it make the community safer? Does it help Lorse Weatherspoon rehabilitate himself? No, it doesn’t.”
READ MORE
Residents distribute cases of water at Grove Park Community Center in Jackson, Mississippi, on Sept. 3, 2022. Major flooding starting in August disrupted the operation of a critical but aging water treatment plant. (photo: Seth Herald/Getty)
US Department of Justice Sues City of Jackson Over Water Crisis
Cristen Hemingway Jaynes, EcoWatch
Excerpt: "The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a proposed order in federal court to appoint a third party manager to oversee the public drinking water system in Jackson, Mississippi, following a months-long crisis that saw 180,000 of its residents without clean and safe drinking water."
The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a proposed order in federal court to appoint a third party manager to oversee the public drinking water system in Jackson, Mississippi, following a months-long crisis that saw 180,000 of its residents without clean and safe drinking water.
A press release from the Department of Justice said the purpose of appointing the Interim Third Party Manager would be to “stabilize” the water system, as well as “build confidence” in the ability of the system to provide safe drinking water to its customers.
“Today the Justice Department is taking action in federal court to address long-standing failures in the city of Jackson’s public drinking water system,” U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement, as E…E News reported. “The Department of Justice takes seriously its responsibility to keep the American people safe and to protect their civil rights. Together with our partners at EPA, we will continue to seek justice for the residents of Jackson, Mississippi. And we will continue to prioritize cases in the communities most burdened by environmental harm.”
According to the press release, the Interim Third Party Manager would have the authority to maintain and operate the city’s drinking water system, “Implement capital improvements to the city’s public drinking water system” and “Correct conditions within the city’s public drinking water system that present, or may present, an imminent and substantial endangerment to the health of the city’s residents.”
Both the city of Jackson and the Mississippi State Department of Heath signed the order. The Department of Justice also filed a complaint against the city on behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The complaint alleged that the city had failed to provide drinking water to its customers in compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act.
Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba told The Guardian in a statement that the city was “pleased we have finally reached an agreement that represents a critical next step in our efforts to provide immediate and long-term solutions for Jackson’s water issues.”
On July 29, the Mississippi State Department of Health issued a boil-water notice for the public drinking water system in Jackson. The following month, the aging infrastructure of Jackson’s water system, coupled with heavy rains and flooding, led to a loss of running water throughout the city and in some areas of neighboring Hinds County. On October 31, the EPA determined that the water in Jackson was once again safe to drink.
“Every American — regardless of where they live, their income, or the color of their skin — deserves access to safe, reliable drinking water,” Assistant Attorney General Todd Kim of the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division said in the press release. “For many years now, the people of Jackson have lived in uncertainty — uncertainty about whether, on any given day, the water that flows from their taps will be safe to drink. With our court filings today, we have taken an important step towards finally giving the people of Jackson the relief they so desperately deserve.”
READ MORE
Contribute to RSN
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
Update My Monthly Donation
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
